 Wow, I'm excited for this. I'm sorry guys, you've got two of me in a row. If I'm looking down at my phone more I didn't write this schedule, but this is gonna be a free-flowing one for sure. So Rahul, let's start with some context, some intros The Superhuman, we all love it, but how did you come to Found Superhuman? How did you come to change our lives with email? How did I come to Found the product? Well, I Previously also had an email company that some folks here may remember called Reportive It was the first Gmail browser extension to scale to millions of users on the right-hand side of Gmail We showed you what people looked like where they worked their recent tweets links to their social profiles and This thing grew like crazy in less than two years I ended up selling it to LinkedIn where I ran all of our email integrations and During those four years. I became intimately familiar with how professionals do their email and the TLDR is Really badly? So we decided let's build the fastest email experience in the world It's blazingly fast where searches instantaneous where everything happens in a hundred milliseconds or less an email experience Where you never actually have to touch the mouse where you could do everything from your keyboard and fly through your inbox an Email experience that had the best Gmail plug-in functionality but built in natively and one of course that just worked offline And so at that vision we built Superhuman now I think I loved about Superhuman was kind of the exclusivity that it had from very very early days It was obviously kind of invite only from what I remember and it had this kind of aura around it And you've been very surgical in terms of how you build buzz and hype to get early customer traction Can you talk to me about how you thought about this and some kind of cool takeaways for you? So we were really surgical about our Positioning and I think this is I want to make this as actionable as possible This is something every startup here can do is get precise about your positioning The best resource to start with is this article by Ariel Jackson. It's called positioning your startup is vital Here's how to nail it. You can Google it right now and in the article. She uses a fill-in-the-blanks approach It goes something like For your target's customer who has a key need or opportunity Your product has a key benefit unlike competing alternatives. This is its key differentiation. It sounds very abstract I'll give you an example. She uses one Harley Davidson so for macho wannabes Who want to join a gang of cowboys and who live in an era of decreasing freedom? Harley Davidson is the only motorcycle manufacturer in the world that makes big loud Motorcycles and if you're familiar with the brand you'll know that captures it in a nutshell And I say this as someone with a Harley in my garage back home So we thought about this for a while and we started asking questions like Are we the Ford of email? No, not really. Are we the BMW or the Mercedes of email? Yeah, still not quite. Are we the Tesla of email? Yes, now we're starting to get somewhere We did a whole bunch more reading and by the way here's another book recommendation Positioning the battle for your mind and we eventually came to the following positioning For leaders and managers of high technology high-growth companies Superhuman is the fastest email experience ever made Especially for those who feel like their work is mostly email It's what Gmail could be if it were built today not 15 years ago and in superhuman everything is meticulously crafted Blazingly fast and happens in a hundred milliseconds or less. Now you might think that is Ludicrously niche how many people in the world could possibly fit that but to paraphrase Paul Buhite to the creator of Gmail It is far more effective To make a lot of people sorry to make a few people like you a lot Then lots of people like you a little because you can always expand from there. That is the key to buzz So one thing that really strikes me that it's like the challenge. I'm sorry. We are off schedule But I'm too interested you like email is is used by every segment of society How do you think about an advice founders when it comes to a horizontal product marketing to when your product is used By so many to make it resonate across so many different verticals. How do you think about that when you think about that messaging? Well, like I said our messaging is Our positioning is extremely precise when it comes to the messaging. This is why I always advise to early-stage startups You don't yet know who your hero user is So like Harry, I also invest if I go to a website and at the very early stage The startup is extremely precise about who it's for that's actually probably a mistake because you don't know yet Have it at the back of your mind. We had the positioning I just gave you at the back of my mind But if you went to our website and indeed if you were to go there today, you wouldn't see any of that So what do you do instead? You simply extol the benefits of your product Explain what it does for people in our case superhuman helps you get through your inbox twice as fast You reply to people faster. You'll save three hours or more every single week But nowhere on the website Will you see it's for founders or leaders or managers or executives or business development or sales or all of the people that we now support? So long story short don't explicitly say who it's for just say what the benefit is How's building for obsessed customers different what makes that truly different to versus just building for broader customer segments? And how do you think about that in the product build-out process? One of the best things about building for obsessed customers is People ask me this all the time. How do you get so much feedback? Well, I tell you if your customers are obsessed if they live or die by your service and for all of our customers email is mission critical You will be Swimming in feedback at this point at superhuman. We've now tagged and triaged over 100,000 Individual different pieces of feedback. These are recorded verbatim Voices of the customer actual sentences and a custom CRM essentially that we've built Explicitly for the purpose of product feedback and you just don't get this with many companies So charge early get obsessed customers. That's one of the benefits So it's charged early what like when should they charge how should they think about pricing lessons there? Because also for you like to be and I mean this politely like 30. What was it 30 bucks 30 good yet? Hey, that's quite a lot for email. Like how did you come to that price? And how do you advise founders on pricing their very early iterations? So we actually charged from day one We even charge all of our investors to use superhuman and that was I know As well, you know that was in the early days How would I advise this to founders? Well again, I would advise Surgical precision and I want to make the super actionable the best resource available for pricing is this book called monetizing innovation by Madhavan Ramanujan Now Madhavan describes various ways to do what he calls Developing pricing and this can get arbitrarily complicated with Conjoint analyses and expensive consultants will definitely do the full bells and whistles approach But you don't have to do it that way if you're an early-stage startup What we did and what everyone here can do is the van Western Dorp pricing sensitivity meter you essentially ask your target market for questions And I'll give you the example of superhuman Number one at what price would this product superhuman be so expensive that you would not buy it number two At what price would this product superhuman be so cheap that you'd be worried about its quality And you also would not buy it those prices exist number three at what point would you? Consider this product to start getting expensive You'd stop and think about it But you would still actually buy it and number four at what points would you consider it a bargain for the money? Now most founders most companies intuitively orient around Question number four and that's usually the right thing to do But as we just discussed the positioning for superhuman is premium Our position is that we are faster and more powerful than Gmail or now office 365 And it turns out that the question that most directly supports that position is question number three It's starting to get expensive But gosh darn it email is so important to me and I want to save those three hours a week I'm still going to buy it anyway, so that's typically what I would advise but there is one more step which is once you have this price figured out and Harry does this math. I'm sure in his sleep at this point. Let's do a quick gut check on market size So you say you want to be a billion dollar company? Well as we just heard valuations are regressing to the mean let's assume at a billion dollars That means that you are 10x your run rate. You need to be a hundred million dollar plus revenue business Well at 30 dollar 30 dollars a month you do the math. It's not hard. You need 300,000 subscribers So we asked ourselves in the early days of superhuman do we think we can get to 300,000 subscribers? We answered. Yeah, absolutely. We can get to 300,000 subscribers And so we went ahead with the price. I think so I totally agree with you there And I love the kind of bottoms-up time analysis The one thing that I also remember very vividly was how struck people were by the onboarding process In terms of building hype, and I'm sorry because we did have this schedule, but it wasn't my schedule So I just prefer mine So like in terms of building hype you did the onboarding process personally with with yourself with other wraps with amazing team members And everyone said it didn't scale and it wouldn't scale like one How do you reflect on that and two how do you advise founders on doing things that don't scale to build hype in the early days? So for those that don't know some a little bit of context Superhuman is famous infamous if you will for and in a sense we pioneered this in technology Insisting on 30-minute one-to-one concierge onboardings for every new person that was using the product and in the early days I did this myself. I actually turned up in person and back then it was an hour And I would bring a gift a bottle of wine or if you didn't drink one, you know something to make you feel really special There's all kinds of obvious reasons to do this However, I'm not gonna claim to be a genius. I didn't sit down in our office and think Oh wouldn't it be amazing if we pioneered this new go-to-market that would completely change the way that people Retain and become viral and so on we actually found it by accident and here is how I had this observation that most Companies especially B to C ish companies and I would count ourselves as B to C to B make the terrible mistake of just launching their products perhaps you go on product tents and If you're in a market like ours general productivity and collaboration Guess what? You'll get tens of thousands of people to sign up in the first few days That used to be impressive these days. That's no longer hard. Here's what happens is those people will come in They'll use your app. They'll kick the tires. They'll break stuff because it's early-stage software Let's be real things are broken. They'll report those bugs and if you don't fix them in time They'll then get disappointed and churn out. That is the very definition of a net detractor and I've seen this happen I've seen it happen countless times. So how do we fix this? Well, we only let on board the precise number of people that we think we can actually handle in terms of fixing bugs for This isn't technical scaling. This is technical debt scaling It's the debt that we all have but that we don't see and so in the early days This was really small I on boarded maybe four or five people a week and that Saturated my small engineering team of ten people But eventually we got the number of bugs down and the products became higher and higher quality We could do ten people a week twenty people a week Until we were doing hundreds of people thousands of people per week and still maintaining a high quality product What we found and here's the reason why we continue to scale it is that we had category Leading benchmarks across basically everything you would care about Retention churn net promoter score products market fit, which is the 40% metric that you may have heard of we came up with previously Retention virality really every which way you could slice it. These users were incredible Now as for the folks who said this wouldn't scale here's the common misconception if you just Grow a large team of people to do onboarding for folks who are not yet sold Then yes, this won't scale but remember Everyone who met or meets an onboarding specialist back then or today is already a customer They've already authorized their credit card. They've already signed up They've probably seen the sent via superhuman signature multiple times and internally. They're mostly sold Not a hundred percent, but mostly and that's what you need in order to make an approach like this work I have to ask as well I had Brian Armstrong on the show from Coinbase the other day and he said, you know the NFT launch the mistake We made was we built buzz too early before the v1 and then never ever has a v1 ever lived up to expectations And so I wanted to hear your thoughts on that like actually the dangers of building buzz Kind of what if v1 doesn't live up to expectations and how do you think about that because I've been thinking back and forth about that Danger of building buzz and whether it's good to set expectations high and create it or actually whether it can create more challenges as well I think we need a healthy balance I've definitely seen founders go the other way They don't build any buzz at all and then by the time they're ready to launch They're starting from scratch. That's not a good idea. Do not do that. I See also and I'm not going to name names that would be Terribly unfair of founders who build way too much buzz Yeah, and then v1 doesn't meet expectations, which by the way is normal. That's to be expected but the Delta is so large and The amount of catch up that that founder now has to do is so great that they never do actually catch up So this is an awfully delicate balance that we need to somehow thread. I think in our case We definitely leaned towards creating buzz in years two and three by which point I would say we still really hadn't launched Not by any reasonable definition But years one through two we were hella quiet. There was barely anything we did. I was establishing thought leadership though For example when mailbox got shutted by Dropbox I thought aha here is a good way to inject myself into the news cycle And I was able to drive north of 10,000 signups just off that little piece of news And we did a few things like that to build our email list up Email is still the best marketing channel of all time. So we by the time that we launched we had perhaps 50,000 people on the email list and another 50,000 people on product hunt upcoming Can I ask did being very public and speaking and writing was that always very natural to you because the most Kind of common thing that I hear from founders is I know I need to build a brand But it's just not me it's just not me and I say well, you know No one loves going to the gym when they first go to the gym But you know you keep going and you get better and better and then a year later It's much more natural Like did you feel very natural at home being that public-facing figure and how's your relationship to kind of your own personal brand building? I guess changed over time in relation to creating buzz It does feel really natural. Yeah, absolutely, and I think this is where We all need to play into our strengths I mean you are naturally an incredible interviewer and it's been but I'm not I've just done it for eight Well, I've done three thousand. I was terrible. So here's the thing I think I was one of your early interviews. You were one of my very early interviews. Yeah, I won the first hundred And I've seen Harry become Come from that humble beginning if you don't mind my saying so to at this point one of the most if not the pre-eminent tech interviewer tech Personality in this industry to the point where I'm like your Harry come back on stage And he's like sure I'll just do this off the top of my head. This is fine, but to answer your question. I Find it very natural Probably the reason is I grew up doing it competitively I was in the debate team, but I'm actually a terrible debater. So in the way that this works in England I don't know if this work is similar in other countries You'd have an opener then some on wood rebut then you'd have someone rebutting that then you'd have a closer The thing is about being the opener. You don't have to really argue with anyone else You don't have to rebut anything you just get to go out there and be theatrical and really enthused in entertainment audience And that was my position because I was terrible at doing the actual arguments But I was really good at riling an audience and so I did this from a very early age and I loved it I yeah, this is this is what I do now if that doesn't mean that's what every founder should do if this if the idea of doing that Makes you terrified or it makes you nervous. Please don't do it. There are things that I Absolutely suck at and I don't I don't even try to do them I try and build a world-class team of other people who can do those things So should they then pass or not pass off but delegate Brown to their COO CMO to kind of build that kind of cult of personality in their brand Should they just promote the superhuman brand? Like do you need a personality? Brand within a company given the cult of personality being so prominent in many of the big companies today Do you see what I mean? I do and I think the short answer is no you do not need your company to have a cult of personality But if you can create one It's an amazing edge and it is easy. We see you on must do this or whether you hate them or like him Kind of it doesn't matter. He is a cult of personality and that is probably one of his strongest assets I totally agree when you when you think back kind of over the superhuman journey I think lessons are often learned through the hardest times. So very unfair to you kind of said I was on the fly So are you? What was the hardest element of the journey with superhuman and what did you learn? Gosh the hardest elements I'm going to give you the cliched answer which is each day feels harder than the last does it? So it doesn't get easier because I was thinking I don't know. I think it does get easier You have more resources you have better teams different problems, but you're not you know sleeping in the office or you know No, I mean I never did sleep in the office Every company has a different culture. We never had that culture. We're very much Believers in this is a marathon not a sprint and I want people to be in it for the for the very long term and it shows By the way in our employee retention metrics and our retribution metrics. We have very very long-lasting employees We don't burn people out so Gosh, there are so many Hardest things I could possibly choose Okay, let me be specific. You're now also selling to companies. What's hard about going from B to C? Like direct consumer story to like selling to companies as well. What's difficult about that transition? Yeah So there is this thing and I'll come to that very shortly Jason Lemkin who who writes the blog sasta amazing and probably my favorite blog Has in many articles said that once you reach ten million dollars of ARR Yeah, I think his phrase is then the cavalry is coming you can breathe just a little bit more easy You know you can maybe take a weekend every now and then that that kind of stuff. I'm like, I'm not sure if that's true It's just as hard Well past that then to for that. So I don't know but selling to companies This is something that If I had a hundred percent retro vision, I wish we had done earlier So just one and a half years ago and actually three years ago when Harry and I will last on this stage We were we were 100% selling to individuals You couldn't buy superhuman as a company as crazy as that sounded Fast-forward to today and we're now selling superhuman also two teams and two companies And this by far is the fastest growing part of our business now You might think oh this must require some kind of fancy team features in order to do that Well, I'm here to tell you that's not true And we drove this change without any team collaboration features whatsoever and furthermore I'm gonna say that almost any startup here can drive this change if you're selling to an individual in the workplace So I'll run through how this loop works because I think it will be useful and actionable It still starts with an individual buying superhuman they then become brilliant at what they do They start getting through their email twice as fast responding faster to messages unblocking their team taking on more projects And this gets noticed internally by their team by their peers by their managers Superhuman then spreads virally inside companies and there are three because I know you're wondering three viral mechanics That make this work number one is the sent by a superhuman email signature And it's shocking that this ancient probably the oldest viral mechanic Still works today and drives north of 20% of our site traffic number two The word of mouth people naturally want to help each other especially inside companies and number three The referral and the invite mechanics So we then grow to like a handful of seats inside a company We then reach out to the company and say hey Do you all want to consolidate these seats onto one team and sometimes the company is like? Why would we do that and we say well you get to pay upfront and annually once as opposed to individually perhaps? You know nine different times depending on how many seats you have number two You hit amazing discounts when you get to ten people and number three Every single user is going to save three hours or more per week So the consolidation is generally a no-brainer and then when it hits ten seats We staff it with a customer success manager and an account manager and the CSM is responsible for driving usage Adoption and engagement and the account manager is responsible for demonstrating the return on investment of buying Superhuman to the customer So the accounts now grow really rapidly and the customer derives a ton of value from superhuman and this loop is Shockingly effective. We're now on target to quadruple teams revenue just this year alone and further I think basically any startup here that's selling to individuals can replicate the same way so we're gonna do a quick fire I'm gonna hit you with a series of questions super quick So let's go with what would you most like to change about the world of venture? How would I? Harry always asked me this quick fire questions and I hmm really good question. Let me let me ponder on that one Yeah, I Would like I Would like to get some we have a lot of oscillation going on right now between valuations being super sky-high valuations being sort of middle of the ground if you're a founder who's coming into this new I just like more clarity for the founders in terms of It was asked in your session like what for example do you need to do to raise a series a now What do you know now that you wish you'd known in getting to your first 1,000 users thinking of the seed founders in the audience getting from zero to a thousand users What do you know now that you wish you'd known then? Well, this one's easy if I could change one thing going backwards We would have built for teams from the get-go now seeing the growth that we're able to achieve I wish that we'd done that from day one. Okay, ten years. We did it's three years ago. We were here ten years Where is superhuman and what does that look like gosh? I remember this question from before you asked me many years ago. We're gonna go back on past tapes each time Let's see. Oh now you can track it over time Okay, so ten years from now We are a Multi-products company and I mean that both for superhuman the email clients Keep your eyes peeled and stay tuned. You'll start to see additions of superhuman tuned Not just for the horizontal email professional but specific Vertical specific job functions and specific industries as well as brand new products that aren't even email now Can I say everyone? Rahul has done the most stellar job here We had a schedule that someone else wrote for some a different moderator He had no idea of the questions that would come. I think he was exceptional So can we give a massive hand to Rahul? That was fantastic for stepping in at the last minute. Thank you